Should anyone desire to buy a confederate flag, from today onward it will likely be quite a difficult task, as Amazon and ebay decided to halt selling it. Although I am hardly a fan of the social system the Confederacy had in place, I feel I should mention this story because it's quite paradigmatic for the ever more common social engineering practice that is taking place in the so-called liberal and democratic west. As usual, the US is leading the charge, but the paragons of western Europe are not far behind.
Since it would still cause a sacrilege to repeal the first amendment, the elites have worked hard and found the next best thing, which is to circumvent it. So instead of an outright ban of any symbol, belief, or idea, the government applies an unsurmountable amount of social pressure to destroy it. It does so through a vast network of non-government organizations, which are really governmental in all but the name. After all, an organization that's selected to be funded by the government based on the governmental opinion of its program is really just a more radical version of the government itself.
So when it gets decided that an idea should be removed from the public eye, hordes of paragovernmental groups are activated and basically force all the media and big businesses to commit self-censorship. Yes, freedom of expression is formally maintained, but in practice it is impossible to freely express oneself without dire consequences. Expressing an unpopular opinion is practically impossible to do without pretty much accepting the fate of having one's life completely destroyed, both on personal as well as business level. Am I overreacting? Unfortunately I'm not.
What is important to realize when we are talking about the freedom of expression is that it's specifically the unpopular opinions which are in need of such a protection. Expressing the popular opinions and admiring the emperor's new garments doesn't need any legal protection at all, it is encouraged even in the most totalitarian of states imaginable. It is unpopular opinions that need to be guarded against the attacks of the mob, and by circumnavigating the first amendment and its international equivalents, they are slowly becoming as dangerous to express as declaring oneself an atheist in Saudi Arabia or medieval Spain.
Just as non-government organizations are anything but non-governmental, today's liberal democracies are slowly becoming anything but liberal. One might ask oneself, is there a reason why this has come to pass? I believe there is. True democracies are really not what one may believe after listening to 12 or so years of state propaganda in schools. They have some quite serious drawbacks, which pretty much all sum up to "nothing ever gets done". Some decisions are hard, and hard decisions often irritate people. There's a reason why it took the US years to defeat the Japanese forces in the Pacific theater, while it took the Russians only three weeks to clear them out of China. If you don't want to fight in a democracy, you stage a protest. Or powerfully cry. If you don't want to fight in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany...well, that's too bad. Getting shot and killed by the enemy is way better than what you'd get from your comrades in case you get caught defecting, so you might as well go ahead and run towards the rain of bullets.
Realizing they are intrinsically weak, and also realizing they really can't just turn themselves into formal totalitarian states, democratic countries turned to something which is best described as soft totalitarianism. Yes, you are formally free, but should you ever decide to take the red pill and stray away from the herd, soon you will find informal Stasi officers ruining your life in every way possible. While not really classical totalitarianism, it still gets things done better than a truly liberal society. And when it gets pushed to the limit, as is nowadays being the case, the only thing it really lacks is formalization. All the other pieces are already in place.
Since it would still cause a sacrilege to repeal the first amendment, the elites have worked hard and found the next best thing, which is to circumvent it. So instead of an outright ban of any symbol, belief, or idea, the government applies an unsurmountable amount of social pressure to destroy it. It does so through a vast network of non-government organizations, which are really governmental in all but the name. After all, an organization that's selected to be funded by the government based on the governmental opinion of its program is really just a more radical version of the government itself.
So when it gets decided that an idea should be removed from the public eye, hordes of paragovernmental groups are activated and basically force all the media and big businesses to commit self-censorship. Yes, freedom of expression is formally maintained, but in practice it is impossible to freely express oneself without dire consequences. Expressing an unpopular opinion is practically impossible to do without pretty much accepting the fate of having one's life completely destroyed, both on personal as well as business level. Am I overreacting? Unfortunately I'm not.
What is important to realize when we are talking about the freedom of expression is that it's specifically the unpopular opinions which are in need of such a protection. Expressing the popular opinions and admiring the emperor's new garments doesn't need any legal protection at all, it is encouraged even in the most totalitarian of states imaginable. It is unpopular opinions that need to be guarded against the attacks of the mob, and by circumnavigating the first amendment and its international equivalents, they are slowly becoming as dangerous to express as declaring oneself an atheist in Saudi Arabia or medieval Spain.
Just as non-government organizations are anything but non-governmental, today's liberal democracies are slowly becoming anything but liberal. One might ask oneself, is there a reason why this has come to pass? I believe there is. True democracies are really not what one may believe after listening to 12 or so years of state propaganda in schools. They have some quite serious drawbacks, which pretty much all sum up to "nothing ever gets done". Some decisions are hard, and hard decisions often irritate people. There's a reason why it took the US years to defeat the Japanese forces in the Pacific theater, while it took the Russians only three weeks to clear them out of China. If you don't want to fight in a democracy, you stage a protest. Or powerfully cry. If you don't want to fight in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany...well, that's too bad. Getting shot and killed by the enemy is way better than what you'd get from your comrades in case you get caught defecting, so you might as well go ahead and run towards the rain of bullets.
Realizing they are intrinsically weak, and also realizing they really can't just turn themselves into formal totalitarian states, democratic countries turned to something which is best described as soft totalitarianism. Yes, you are formally free, but should you ever decide to take the red pill and stray away from the herd, soon you will find informal Stasi officers ruining your life in every way possible. While not really classical totalitarianism, it still gets things done better than a truly liberal society. And when it gets pushed to the limit, as is nowadays being the case, the only thing it really lacks is formalization. All the other pieces are already in place.
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